The hastily melting Hudson

I went down to the Hudson River today–and the river was hastily melting. It was a violent place in a very subtle way. That sound is not breaking glass, but the weight of gravity stressing perilously stacked sheets of clear ice, that fall upon one another and shatter.

The northwest wind, a constant presence, whips an oak leaf, brown and brittle of autumn. It glides across the ice and alights in water.

But it was also peaceful.

Out on the floe that small mound of snow encrusting chuncks of clear ice looks from here as if I was looking down from 10,000 feet above the mountains of Antarctica.